Tennis video game Top Spin 3 swings and misses

Perhaps you thought there could be nothing more difficult in the sport of tennis than beating Roger Federer? You were dead wrong.

Try taking aim at Top Spin 3 from 2K Sports, an exercise in funless futility where success is even getting a proper rally going.

Don't get me wrong. The premise here is good enough. Top Spin 3 ($59.99) has familiar ATP and WTA tour characters like Andy Roddick and Maria Sharapova. And the game has good graphic details when you're sliding into shots on the red clay of Roland Garros in Paris. There are also lots of options for creating your own player and tweaking his or her look and playing style to suit your fancy.

But unless you're willing to put in hours -- and I mean hours -- learning the least intuitive player controls ever conceived, you might as well go hit the ball (or your head) against a wall.

Here's the hang-up. The braintrust behind Top Spin 3 wants you to do nothing at the very moment you should do something -- namely hit the ball. To accomplish that most basic feat, Top Spin 3 wants you to not press a button.

It's extremely difficult to overcome the desire to press a button went you want the most common character activity to happen. Instead, in the Xbox 360 version I tried, the game wants you to decide what type of stroke to hit (by pressing "B" for topspin, "A" for a flat shot, etc.) and then release that button as the ball approaches your player.

In the training mode, I didn't even make contact with the first 20-plus balls that floated my way. Sure, I persevered, but it should have fun instead of painfully laborious.

Eventually, I figured out enough of the control timing to try my fate in career mode. So I hit the tour. It was ugly. I didn't even win a point against my first opponent, and only mustered one against my second. They didn't blast me from the